You are the love you are looking for.
I considered this idea of a healthy, long-lasting and satisfyng love relationship for many years. In this quest, I spent such a long time to study love, relationships, bonding and attachment. I went back to study the origin of love, the moments in our life when we learn to love from our first models. And I observed how we repeat what we don’t repair, how we end up in relationships that are a mold of our previous ones, unless we do something to break this mechanism.
Love is often described as a given. Something you’re supposed to have, as if you could take a person, make him or her yours and get your needs partially satisfied by your partner for a long time.
Personally I believe there’s drama waiting to happen in this mechanism and the quest for a need that has been waiting for a long time. So I learnt a lot about love. I got my heart broken several times. I hated the feeling of getting lost when a relationship ended. Until I realised that if I was feeling lost at the end of a relationship, it was because I was lost as well during it, and this had nothing to do with the other person involved. This is when I decided to study Bowlby’s theory of attachment. I learnt about love addictions and how they’re often described as true love and burning passion. In this post I talk about what I learnt, hoping it will be helpful for you.
WHAT IS LOVE
Love is not a relationships based on co-dependency and reciprocal needs’ satisfaction. We are free to love and expect nothing back, because love is a gift, not an expectation. It can’t be claimed.
Love in its adult form is a relationship based on caring and freedom and can’t happen if we have open wounds, if we don’t want to look at them, if we didn’t heal. Love relationships without self-love end up being relationship made of expectations, control, fear of losing the person who cares for us.
So how can you know if the relationship you are in is based on love and freedom? You can asses the quality of the relationships in your life finding out which ones of them are free and disinterested. Because all the relationships that aren’t disinterested are self-interested. When a relationship is self-interested it means it’s about satisfying reciprocal needs. Needs that the two partner can’t satisfy on their own, for themselves or others.
When a partner is needed to satisfy those needs, it’s not about the person, it’s about the needs.
We all have needs. As children, we need others to get our needs satisfied, because we aren’t fully autonomous and independent. As adult, we are able to satisfy our needs. We become independent and we are able to free ourselves from pain when we are in need. But if there are open wounds, we still suffer and we need to heal. Healing is needed to become strong and stop repeating the same mistakes again and again. When the don’t heal ourselves, we ask other people to take care of our old wounds, unhealed trauma and pain. We ask them to comfort us and fix us, but they can’t. We are the only ones who can know this for ourselves.
And once we become able to fully take care of ourselves, to accept and love who we are, a partner will be a great opportunity to share good moments and build something new. A great opportunity to be loved as we are, without expectations and without masks. We’re meant for this. So if you feel you need some help with this, download the free To-Do Love List and get started with more self-love:
